Wilted
by CeliaBlair24
Summary: Yang moves back to Vale after having spent the last several months hiding away in Mistral, sadder than Weiss ever remembers her being. As her longtime best friend (seven years and counting), Weiss takes it upon herself to help her. No matter the cost.


_In the deep of the wild where flowers bloom freely, that is where I truly feel free._

* * *

_Red tipped petals flutter along matted summer breeze, heady with promises of warmth and forever. Through the thickening fog of exhilaration, the breathless rush of satisfaction, she sees it. Sun on the horizon, the bronzing sky settling itself into encroaching darkness as the winds whistle to its bidding._

_"Stay,"_

_Red tipped petals, an orange sky. The sun crests where flowers meet blanketing green mountains, and further still, where cumulus clouds lather the graying crowns of far-off sierras._

_A whisper of words, of promised secrets. Hair in the wind, strands of black and blonde and dusty red. Warmth in startled laughter, whose truth drip like poison on un-sprouted seedlings._

_"If you would have me."_

_Darkness comes slowly, a creeping widow sinuously trailing along ruinous walls, banking the light spread over dancing petals in this field of flowers. Water trickles against a bedding a minutes' walk from here, a stream mingling with breath and play and happiness. And she hears it here as clearly as if she were right before them, looking in without hiding away._

_"I love you,"_

_Gold flecked eyes, a love-pinched smile._

_The world blackens away._

* * *

**January 7, year 20**

Home is winter-crisped; salted breeze and yawning waves, the mooring of cargo ships in the distance. Home is crowdedness, the warmth of bodies brushing by, covered and gloved and as red nosed as you are. It's twisted, black-branched elms and fallen leaves, frost over glass planes and snow that never heaps.

Home is here, settled in the heart of Vale City. The faintest glow of the early morning curling over thick shadows through sun-bright diaphanous curtains, fanning the expanse of pale skin and paler sheets; the titillating warmth of the first light.

Clear blue eyes settle on the streets below, the cars lining the sidewalk. It's barely 6 o'clock now, the outside's emptied of life and noise as winter corrals the worst of the winds to harden ice-packed stone and small scatterings of snow in preparation for daybreak.

How quiet. How _cold_.

And right then, Vale City seems just a little like Atlas. Yet, all the same, a little…_not_. Smaller somehow, in feeling and in coolness. _Better_.

"Weiss?"

A quiet mumble against the sheets. Ruby turns over, blinking up with wide, silver-gray eyes.

"You're awake. It's _so_ early…"

She drawls off, stifling a yawn with a clenched fist. Her nose crinkles cutely, and she presses herself further into the bed, wrapping sheets and fur-lined blanket both around her shivering frame.

"You're not cold?"

Ruby asks, sticking out a reddened finger from shuddering bear-white blankets. Weiss blinks back, manages somehow to conjure up a small smile as she relaxes into the bedding's by the window.

"I'm used to it."

* * *

If one had asked Weiss Schnee merely two years before, where she would be now, the answers would be simple. With her family in Atlas. She'd be training like the rest of them had trained before her, learning trade and finance like her sister, negotiation like her brother, and father and grandfather before her. Continuing the line of succession, as was her duty.

_But duty holds little weight in the lands of the living._

Two years were like lightning in a world driven by technology. One clouded end archaic, and the sizzle before sound the means to modern actualization.

Once, the weights had tipped towards the former. Towards dust-mines and airships; trivializing bonds and summer breeze, sand-speckled hair in the knot of her memories. Once, when she hadn't known any better, she'd busied herself with a life she never wanted to live.

_Not anymore._

Ruby wears her way through thick-tiled floors, the fluff of red bunny house sandals chafing away at the gloss. One hand reaches conspicuously for a glass of water, and the other holds tight onto her scroll, shaking even from this far out.

Weiss adjusts her reading glasses.

"I know, Yang. Yes, _I know!"_

They've been going at this for nearly an hour now. Conversation like tipping tides in a volleyball match. Yang says something sarcastic, Ruby calls her out on it. Vice versa. Rinse, repeat.

"It'll only be temporarily, Yang, we talked about this—n_o!"_

Ruby, though her shoulders shake still with the chill of the weather (Patch had never been cold, she'd said. Yet it snowed so much more there) is red-faced in a way that didn't imply any conservation of warmth. There's a tingling there, a sizzling sharp anger griping at her from within Rose-crusted veins. It makes Weiss' hair stand on edge. Almost.

"Yang? Yang. No, don't you start making excuses again."

She switches hands, runs clamoring fingers through sleep-tangled hair as Yang yappers on from behind the confines of the communication line. Ruby had never been one for confrontation, no, so seeing her all worked up (though it was kind-of worrying) was more amusing than anything.

She frowns, lips pulled so far down the tips fanned just shy of the jut of her chin. Cute.

"I already talked to Weiss about this. Like I said, its _fine_."

A yell… Or cry. Maybe both.

"Give me the scroll,"

For the brief moment when their eyes meet, Ruby looks damn near euphoric.

"Xiao Long, hey, long time no chat,"

A sizzle on the other end of the line. Oil on a pan. Lunch?

"_Hey Princess,"_

Quiet, a murmur against the sudden harshness of the sound.

_"Sorry, sorry, have steak on."_

A clicking sound, and the sizzling stops. Weiss raises a brow, settling onto a barstool as Ruby gangways through the kitchenette, gathering up ingredients so she could scruff up something for breakfast.

"You talked to your sister while cooking?"

_"She understands."_

A chuckle.

_"You really don't mind?"_

The pitter-patter of light footfalls. Weiss could almost envision it then, the polished wooden flooring and the smooth glide of the _shoji _opening up to the apartment's interior garden. She'd been to the place a couple of times before, it was her sisters, after all.

"I don't."

Yang sighs, loud enough that she almost clears out the cricketing and chittering of the garden animals. Weiss tuts.

"You know, I'd be more excited about coming back here if I were you. Not to be _that_ person, but I doubt your Uncle would like you intruding on them any longer than necessary, never mind my sister."

A whistle, low and familiar. If she were a different person, Ruby, perhaps, maybe she'd have laughed.

"Don't even start, Yang. Just don't."

The blonde giggles, and Weiss hears the dull pound of old wood from the other end of the line. Warbled though it was.

"You know, she wouldn't appreciate you terrorizing the Koi like that, either."

Ruby walks by her, eggshells in her hands and brows raised high. Weiss shrugs.

_"How'd you know?"_

A laugh, and the light splash of water, presumably (_hopefully_) as Yang shakes her feet dry.

"I have ears."

A full-bellied laugh then, and in the background, she can almost hear Qrow's grumbling about the _early_ _morning_.

"So…"

She goads later on, when it seems like Yang's settled enough to speak.

"When are you coming?"

She smells omelets and toast. Coffee. Through the thin plywood bordering kitchenette and bar, she can hear Ruby humming to herself.

_"Next week. I'll be there by next week."_

A sigh. It's sad, almost.

_"I'm really gonna miss the free booze here."_

Weiss grins.

"Sure thing."

* * *

**January 15, year 20**

_"Ruby! Weiss!"_

She comes running out like a freight train. A _particularly_ heavy one. Wild hair loose and barely kept from her eyes by black lipped aviators. Like a particularly excitable Golden Retriever, honestly, with one long hair appointment overdue.

"C'mere!"

It's by the luck of the world that both she and her wife were…tiny, compared to the busty blonde. When she tugs them both to her, sun-bright smile and all, they crash together like opposing magnets, bumping heads and damn near suffocating on the…blobs of flesh being squished to their faces.

"_Yannnnnnnnggggggg_!"

Ruby whines, voice muffled by the fabric of Yang's coat. Silently, Weiss agrees, tattooing a bruise into the side of Yangs' covered arm, hoping (failingly) for some respite.

"A sec, need to revel in this a bit. Reunions ya know,"

She grunts, somehow squishing them tighter.

"_HNMMHHHPPFTMHH_!"

When she finally lets go, a fair few minutes afterwards, she's grinning widely, hair askew and aviators sliding off the tip of her nose. Weiss'd say she looked crazy, if it weren't for the fact that she was Yang.

"You're _early_,"

Ruby croons, skipping off city bricks with Yang's duffle bag slung over her shoulders. The white noise of the train station settles into a quiet hum that patters off soon enough into the expected grumble of cars and traffic as they walk out. Yang's a little less disheveled now, having borrowed a spare hair-tie from Weiss to at least temper the worst of her hair. According to her (though Weiss isn't sure if she was exaggerating or not) the sudden shift in temperature made her hair all wiry and dry anyway, and it was all she could do to make it look even remotely presentable.

"'Course! Can't I miss my baby sis…es?"

For her effort, she gets a groan from Weiss and a bell-light giggle from Ruby, who seems to have gotten over the fact that Yang had (just before arriving. _Again_) basically had her running mind and mouth in circles for almost an hour instead of just asking her to hand the scroll to Weiss for cross-country train ticket prices. For the fun of it, of course.

"So, you'll get the guest room by the living room. That okay with you?"

Weiss asks when they arrive, still toeing off her winter boots; Yang leaning on the wall beside her.

"Anything's fine, so's long as it's got a bed, a pillow and space for my desktop, which, by the way, I am not gonna wait for."

Weiss conceals her surprise. With some effort, of course.

"Thought you didn't want furniture in til you got your place fixed back up?"

She can hear Ruby bustling around the apartment, steps feather light and all-too-loud all the same. She'd sprinted in before either Weiss or Yang had even made it to the front door, yelling something about surprises and_ "I'm not ready yet!"_, which, when Yang had turned to her about, she'd shrugged off. They were married, didn't mean they were attached to the hip or anything.

"Ah, well ya see, I met this guy—_no_! Not like _that_!"

Weiss frowns, hanging up her coat as Yang rambles on. Something about a videogame, image graphics and whatnot. Weiss had sort-of tuned it out when it seemed like even story-Qrow— when he came in—was sick of it.

"Ta da!"

Ruby squeals, bounding out of Yang's borrowed room, positively buzzing with excitement.

"Wha?"

"A welcome-gift basket!"

Ruby says, finally. Voice pitched and words slurring with the speed of them.

"See?"

Weiss looks down, smirking as Yang takes ahold of the woven basket, ears a fiery red, and not because she was angry, for once.

"I got you your favorite chocolates, a couple coupons I found for the game store. Oh! And I also got you a couple hand sanitizers as well, I know how you get about those-_that_"

Germs. Yeah. Weiss chuckles at Yang's full body cringe. With the way the blonde lived, all exploring and wilderness, it didn't come as a surprise that she'd grown rather…averse to some of the things she tended to find travelling outback.

"Thanks, Ruby."

A smile, smaller this time. Way smaller than anything she'd spared them since she'd arrived.

Yet, somehow— _somehow_ it seemed _realer_. More _genuine_.

"I really appreciate it."

* * *

The next time she wakes, it's to moonlight and the chilled breeze of an early winter morning. She sits by the windowsill, pale hands on frosted glass as snow drifts in sweeping clumps outside.

_Two centimeters thick._

It'd snowed hard last night, sometime after they'd arrived. Heavy winds and ice-sharp rain. Then snow. Heavy, _heavy_ snow that piled over door fronts and windowpanes. Pressed into street-sides and over streetways. Iced over the roads and the rails.

Yang had sat with her, watched as it'd gone on. Ruby had long gone to bed.

_"I miss Mistral already,"_

She'd said, shimmying herself into the tiny blanket Weiss had covering her, dumb smile and all.

_"Sad thing then, you're stuck with us."_

The words had been hard to say then, clogging her throat with tears she was sure she'd gotten rid of a long seven months ago. Yang smiled for her, patting her arm and brushing back her hair.

_"At least it's you both. I dunno what I'd do, if it were anyone else."_

Weiss watches on now, sifting through mind and memory for sun-bright smiles and twinkling eyes. As the snow drifts and the air warms with the oncoming daylight, Weiss thinks she remembers when it was, the very last time she'd seen them.

_"You look beautiful,"_

In a little out-of-the-way café, tucked inconveniently between a bank and an authentic Atlesian restaurant. The outsides crowded, contrasting the barren normalcy within. Sea-chimes over the door, the beach-happy chalkboards and mint green, summer-accents. Plastic chairs, plastic tables.

_"Thanks, Yang."_

She'd worked there a while, back when she was in college, and a little while after when all she'd had for income was a low-paying apprenticeship and her sister's occasional mercy. She'd seen them there often enough, and then a long time afterwards, when she'd stopped going to the café as a barista, and just as a way to clear time. Coffee in hand, just the way she liked.

_"Just telling it how it is, Blake."_

Sometimes, when her thoughts _somehow_ don't feel nearly so poisonous, so _murderous_, she looks back on those times. Much like she does now, breath fogging up clear glass as the first rays of daylight shoot through the thick blue of the morning sky.

She'd never truly hated anyone. Not her mother or her father for being the people that they were. Not any of the students who'd picked on her in school, nor any of the lowlifes hiding out as nobles and socialites, picking her brains in galleries and balls for a chance at her fathers' wallet. No one, in her long 20 years of living and breathing.

Until _her_.

_Belladonna_.

Like the poison. Black as the night, a winsome, _lying_ coquette.

Outside was a grayscale of snow, ice and brick. Though washed by the beginnings of mornings rays, all she saw was cold.


End file.
